Category Archives: Viaducts

Besides the High Line in New York City, this report from Wired describes the “Low Line” , the initiative from former Google and NASA employees to build a 450 square meter underground park in an abandoned underground trolley terminal. Expanding on their indoor Lowline Lab which has had nearly 75000 visitors, the new initiative proposes the world’s first underground park, complete with a forest, water features, and plants.

“The Lowline’s skylight system uses external Sun-tracking parabolic dishes to gather and concentrate sunlight to 30 times its regular intensity. Internal optics filter out the hot rays, and the incoming sunlight is then distributed in a modulated way, to suit the vegetation – including exotic plants, mosses and hops. “Tropical species do best, but flowering varieties have also done very well,” says Barasch, one of the founders.

If approved, ten million dollars is needed for the investment and city approval. The goal for opening the world’s first underground park is 2021.

1. A new barrier: a ground-level eight-lane road replacement

2. A plan that is detrimental to the city’s cycling and pedestrian goals

3. A new steep wedge between B.C. Place and Rogers Arena

4. “The viaducts are an eyesore”

5. What’s wrong with the idea of excess road capacity?

6. The removal plan’s cost: a $200 million beautification project

Among the points that caught my eye was #4, and the statement that the city had done little thinking about how to make use of the space beneath the viaducts:

The land under the viaducts is not wasted land; the area is under-utilized due to a severe lack of imagination from the municipal government. The viaducts provide sheltered areas for our wet climate and the skatepark currently located underneath the viaducts at Quebec Street are examples of what can be built underneath.

It could accommodate civic plazas, park space, night markets, and even restaurants and shopping malls. The spaces between the viaduct structures could also be an opportunity for infill tower development, with commercial and offices on the lower levels and residential on the upper levels.

He notes Granville Island, in the shadow of the enormous Granville Bridge, as a prime example, and includes a number of photos from other cities of repurposed space framed by outdated infrastructure.

Before Vancouver’s Georgia Viaduct was implemented, there was an active community that existed between Union and Prior Streets in Vancouver. This excellent 16 minute film Secret Vancouver: Return to Hogan’s Alley features stories of Hogan’s Alley, the residents, the stories and the music of a very connected, talented neighbourhood. Narrated by native son and historian John Atkin, the erasing of this community was a direct result of the superiority of motordom.

Just like other North American cities, the downtown areas home to Asian and African Canadian populations were targeted as clearing blight for the technological advantage of the car in the 1950’s. Finding out the community that was is the focus of Chris and Melissa Bruntlett’s article Women in Urbanism: Stephanie Allen on correcting past errors. Stephanie Allen has researched what happened to the small community of Hogan’s Alley as part of her Master’s thesis. In her current work she identifies the importance of public engagement in the redevelopment of this area when the viaducts are removed, and believes that developers and government should give priority to people who “cannot or will not have the same access to housing as other more affluent citizens”. Ms. Allen references the City of Portland’s Right to Return Program which provides incentives for displaced people to return to the areas where they originally formed communities.

Ms. Allen is now looking at creating models of successful mixed-income developments, allowing people with diverse backgrounds to form new communities. She identifies the importance of day-to-day management and equal involvement of market and non-market residents from the time of move-in to ensure a shared sense of responsibility and ownership. It is interesting work, and the rediscovery of the history of Hogan’s Alley illustrates the richness of what was lost-and what could be recreated.

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ReConnecting Vancouver: After the Viaducts

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Led By Michael Alexander

May 7, 2016, 1:00 PM, 1 Hour

May 8, 2016, 11:00 AM, 1 Hour

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The Viaducts are coming down. Learn what could replace them— including your ideas for new neighbourhoods and parks!.The viaducts disrupted and divided important historic neighbourhoods in our City, including Hogan’s Alley, which served as a hub for Vancouver’s black community until the viaducts. Scarred by the viaduct structures, the area today is a mix of highway-adjacent parks and pathways, with a new bicycle-friendly corridor along Union Street. It is a well-positioned and exciting area of the city, with rare opportunities for neighbourhood-building, affordable housing, and safe streets..We’ll visit the area and see how it’s used today by local residents — including lower-income and homeless Vancouverites — local businesses, and regional commuters. Looking ahead to the replacement of the viaducts, we’ll explore how to reconnect the adjacent communities and repair the urban fabric ruptured in the highway-building frenzy of the 1960s and 70s..Walk Start: Across from the Downtown Skate Park on Quebec Street. We’ll be standing across the street from the Vancouver Skate Park..Go here to register (at “I’m going” tab).

Vancouver is a young city. While this means we don’t have our own Arc de Triomphe (though some seem to imagine we do), we are lucky that if we let ourselves, we get to stand on the shoulders of giants.

I wrote about Design Thinking the other day, the great thing about this is that, somewhat like the scientific method, it establishes a systematic way of thinking which sometimes demands creativity, and at other times introspection, it involves the sharing of ideas, and the ability to learn from others.

What it does not involve is reinventing the wheel because you didn’t notice that someone else already did.

From the beginning of urbanized America, streets functioned to provide mobility in many ways:

People walked to work, trolley, horse-drawn then powered moved workers from factories and offices to home. Trains played a role in commutes. Bicycles incited a pedal power mobility craze for a while.

Then the automobile came along. By the 1950s, roads became the sole domain of automobiles. The automotive industry even created the term “jay walking” and launched a campaign to demonize people on foot. Sidewalks shrunk and beautifully landscaped medians were torn out to create more lanes for automobiles.

Trolley lines were ripped out and replaced with buses. But buses were devalued and branded as last ditch transportation for the unfortunate. Only the sedan was fit for the upwardly mobile middle class American. Crosswalks were diminished. Those brazen enough to move around on two feet were seen as merely an impediment to moving more cars faster.

Government loans encouraged suburban single family homebuilding, giving rise to the super highway, and when highways weren’t enough, surface streets – even the most picturesque and historic – were overhauled to turn them into another layer of de facto highways.

(Anything seem familiar in these? … if not, as Gordon has written, Motordom 2.0 is around the corner)

We get to learn how to install a bike share by looking at New York City (or Paris, or Montreal) … and get to see what happens when you have a combination of bike-share and helmet laws by looking at Melbourne.

We get to see why limits of pollution are a good idea by looking at Beijing’s air quality (or this last week, Salt Lake City), even if we don’t read the Governator Arnold’s words last month, and why putting all our stock in LNG isn’t the best idea:

I, personally, want a plan. I don’t want to be like the last horse and buggy salesman who was holding out as cars took over the roads. I don’t want to be the last investor in Blockbuster as Netflix emerged. That’s exactly what is going to happen to fossil fuels.

And we get to look at things like fare gates in transit, and see if you install them, you have to make provision for the fact that when you put up a barrier, you put up a barrier, and some people won’t be able to deal with this fact. Again, in this we’re not unique, John Graham’s comments yesterday show one solution, but I can’t imagine its a cheap one.

The point of this is that in some ways, Vancouver is exceptional, we have an environment that many people would kill for, mountains that many dream about, and are generally pretty nice people. We are not, however, really that different from anywhere else except for the number of Learners permits on Lamborghinis … so let’s be creative and do RAD SHIT as often as possible, but let’s also learn from others just as often, from both their success, and their failure.

Some Rad Shit from LA … with all of last fall’s various discussions about the demolition of the viaducts, and the corresponding whispers and conspiracy theories about who is benefitting, who is driving the decision, what kind of spaces will be created, who will make money on the deal, will affordable housing be created, will more ‘safe deposit boxes in the sky be created … here is another option from LA:

Interesting commentary from Vancity Buzz columnist Kenneth Chan on maintaining the status quo for the Vancouver viaducts. I have to admit given Kenneth’s usual pro-transit stance and excellent feel for what makes cities work, I was a bit perplexed as to his seemingly pro-Motordom stance … that is until I read his thoughts on the hottest urban design topic in the city at the moment.

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There are some great points here. I for one advocate for keeping areas of the city funky, gritty, cheap, by celebrating the Rough versus the Refined as my old professor Moura Quayle once taught us. Kenneth’s vision asks the question what if we tried to work with the space instead of hitting Vancouver’s seemingly default button of bulldoze and replace?

In addition there is the concerning shell game regarding traffic design that needs to be addressed; why remove a pseudo freeway in the sky and replace it with a 6 lane Pacific Blvd decapitating the much celebrated shiny new park space? If this is deemed necessary, can we ramp up the park on either side to bridge an at-grade arterial creating a continuous park experience/connection? After all the site is reputed to be contaminated so capping the park with clean fill is more than likely required and would alleviate the high cost of tunneling Pacific Blvd.

If we do go ahead with removing the Viaducts lets strive to create a world class space that will leave a legacy of such a bold decision. Vancouver’s version of Millennium park perhaps, or taking a cue from Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture park or learning from Toronto’s evolving great new urban lakeshore spaces.

Shortly after City Council voted to proceed with demolishing the Viaducts came this:

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B.C. Transportation Minister Todd Stone said the City of Vancouver needs to “cool down” on its plan to remove the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts. …

“I checked with my officials and it has been a number of years since the city took any meaningful steps to reach out to PAVCO which owns and operates B.C. place,” said Stone.

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Stephen Quinn in The Globe quickly demolished that line:

(Minister Todd Stone) went on to say that he was not aware of any meaningful discussions between the city of Vancouver and PavCo and, to him, this was a concern.

He was wrong.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson told me in an interview later that day that over the past two years there have been at least eight meetings between senior city staff and top officials at PavCo to work on a plan for the eventual removal of the viaducts.

“There’s a good paper trail on this,” he said. “…

A source at City Hall supplied me with the dates of those meetings. The mayor was right – there were eight of them between April, 2014, and September of this year.

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So what’s going on? It’s hard to believe that the Minister was so poorly briefed. Or is this simply a case of looking for any justification to overrule the City and maintain the Viaducts?

If so, why?

It certainly leads to speculation that the long-term intent of the Province is to effectively replicate the purpose of the proposed Chinatown freeway in order to link Highway 1 with downtown. I’m thinking, in particular, of my speculation here – in which the Viaducts would be a piece of a larger corridor.

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Click to enlarge

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The Province could assemble any number of arguments: PavCo’s and stadium requirements, the new St. Paul’s Hospital needs for access, a desired tunnel under Grandview by the residents themselves, a ‘parkway’ with sound protection for residents along East 1st – all without ever using the term freeway.

And don’t forget: no transit upgrades to serve growth from the east, thanks to the defeat of the referendum. Therefore the need to maintain and enhance road access.

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Then there are these comments on the Viaduct decision, picked up by Bob Mackin:

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So who’s Geoff Freer? This guy:

Not only executive director of the Gateway Project and South Fraser Perimeter Road but also, now, executive project director for the Massey Bridge, and likely the widening of Highway 99.

In other words, the go-to guy to build the massive highway and bridge infrastructure that will bring new lanes of traffic right up to the borders of Vancouver.

And then what?

Perhaps that’s really what the Minister means: The Viaducts are not a ‘done deal’ because, possibly, another deal is in the works.

I took this shot a few hours ago from the upper deck of Science World:

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It lines up exactly with Georgia Street – as architect Bruno Freschi intended when he designed the Expo Preview Centre, with the Lost Lagoon Fountain as the western end of this visual axis.

Once the viaduct is demolished and a ramp dropping down to the creek provides straight-ahead continuity, this exercise in City Beautiful urban design should make a lot more sense. Not a big deal – but a nice touch.

Here was Georgia Street at 4:15 pm, on the first day when the Georgia Viaduct was limited to only one lane during rush hour:

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And a little later:

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The traffic flowed. How disappointing: no Carmaggedon. Once again.

Given that that Georgia has already been restricted by construction of the Telus Building, that the viaducts had been completely closed off for the Olympics without catastrophe, and that there had been plenty of publicity about the film restrictions in this case, the media wasn’t overhyping the possibility of car chaos. Instead, the angle was whether this made a good test for permanent closure.

From News1130:

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – For years, Vancouver City Council has flirted with the idea. But is closing the Georgia Viaduct for filming of the movie “Deadpool” an accidental test for the possible dismantling of it and the Dunsmuir span?

The City claims it isn’t, but we’re hearing a different perspective:

Transportation expert Gordon Price with SFU says he’d be amazed if this wasn’t seen as a test, adding it’s a great opportunity to see what the reaction would be, what kind of mitigation would need to be done, and what kind of information we’d need to be given.

He thinks it will play a role in deciding whether to take the viaducts down permanently.

“People will remember it because it’s a real-time, real-life experiment. If, say, things go well or badly, or both — I mean, it depends on how each of us is affected by it — then sure, it’ll be part of the decision.”

Price adds the outcome of the transportation plebiscite will also likely play a role.

“Because after all, the expectation was growth could be handled in the region, assuming that we have better transit so that we don’t have to be as reliant on roads and bridges. If that’s not the case, then by default, do we have to maintain and actually expand road capacity? It’s one of these unknowns at this point, but I think it’s part of the consideration that goes into this.”

He expects council will receive a pair of reports before the summer that could determine whether the spans stay or go.

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Still, it’s extraordinary that in face of all the evidence and repeated demonstration (as you can read in the comments), we still think that reducing road space is either an impossibility given our reputation for congestion or just bad for business. But then, how can a city said to have the worst congestion in North America take out capacity of its major arterial without significant impact – unless of course that rating was never true in the first place.

NIAGARA FALLS – A half-century after Robert Moses built the Niagara Falls expressway that bears his name, New York State has finally agreed to tear it down.

Giving in to decades of local pleas to remove the Robert Moses Parkway, State Parks officials on Wednesday pledged to remove the highway from downtown Niagara Falls to its northern neighborhoods, and possibly farther. …

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The highway, which stretches along the city’s waterfront, was built by Moses, the state’s “master builder,” in the 1960s as a supplement to the Niagara Power Project. The road provided unparalleled views of the Niagara Gorge to motorists but cut off generations of city residents from the waterfront and diverted traffic outside of the central business districts of Niagara Falls.

Moses – the Power Broker – is one of the great polarizing figures of 20th-century urban planning and development. ” His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation…..”

Meanwhile, the debate continues about the fate of another stretch of freeway from the city’s northern neighborhoods to the suburb of Lewiston. The Buffalo News reports that environmentalists are fighting to convert that portion back into forestland while the local state senator wants to turn it into a two-lane park road, matching the one in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

In February, the Mayor and Council will consider the next major step for creating a new neighbourhood at the top of False Creek to replace the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.

This is a city building moment, like those that transformed the downtown peninsula.

I hope you will join me in supporting the Mayor’s leadership on this initiative. Below is a letter that would do that.

You have two opportunities:

• Mail me – malexander@pobox.com – with your name and email address, and I will add your endorsement to the letter to Mayor and Council.

• If your prefer to support in your own words, please send your email to mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca

Please feel free to forward this email to like-minded friends and colleagues.

Thank you for your interest,

Michael Alexander
Urbanist
malexander@pobox.com

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Dear Mayor and Council,

It’s time for Vancouver to make a bold and visionary move to transform the north shore of False Creek.

It’s time for council to approve the replacement of the obsolete and underutilized Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, as proposed to council last July, with a new surface roadway system at the heart of a new, sustainable neighbourhood linking Yaletown and the downtown core with Chinatown, Strathcona and the new community emerging around the Olympic Village.

The benefits to the city and its citizens are enormous, replacing the wasteland beneath and around the elevated structures with:

new housing for thousands of families;

new acres of parks and recreational facilities, including some that have been promised for two decades;

It is hard not to compare similar plans in Sydney, Australia where I lived for 15 years before moving here.

There were similar calls in Sydney to take down the Cahill Expressway, an eyesore that sits directly above Circular Quay just a block away from the Opera House, after the city’s Harbour Tunnel was completed. … The area south of the Vancouver viaducts and the False Creek precinct remind me of Darling Harbour in Sydney which has become a thriving business and commercial area …

I can’t stop thinking about the proposed demolition of the viaducts. Is the plan bold enough and does the plan really maximize the potential for the valuable blocks of land, the communities in the area, or even the economy of the Lower Mainland?

Instead of diverting traffic to an upgraded Pacific Boulevard, what if the city really gets serious and builds a tunnel that takes traffic under False Creek and joins Terminal Avenue at the other end? Wouldn’t that benefit commuters and the communities along Prior St by providing an alternative route to the city from Highway 1? Wouldn’t that also eliminate the need to build the Malkin Connector?

I just came across this golden nugget in Halcrow’s traffic forecasting report for the removal of Vancouver’s viaduct stubs:

Although past trends from actual counts show a decrease in automobile volumes, the model does predict an increase of just over 4% in vehicle-based travel as a result of land use growth. Even though past trends have shown a decrease in auto travel to and from downtown, the model predicts a slight increase. This is likely a reflection of the model not accounting for vehicle ownership which is low in the downtown area compared to other parts of the region.

The elevated Interstate 81 lays above the gritty downtown of Syracuse, New York, (map here) like an immense basilisk. The highway’s noise, grungy concrete, and particulates enforce an anti-people zone in the heart of the city. It has been called Syracuse’s “Berlin Wall,” dividing neighborhoods and the city by race.

Now, the 1.4-mile-long Syracuse “viaduct” is crumbling and nearing the end of its useful life. Officials must decide whether to tear it down or spend upwards of a half billion dollars — mostly federal money — to replace it, according to a report on NPR. Removing the highway would spur significant development, a State University of New York study finds. But a project manager for the state DOT raises fears that local streets could not handle the traffic.

After 22 years, a vision SPUR fought hard for was finally underway: the transformation of Doyle Drive from a clunky and dangerous artifact into a graceful entryway to the city. When the $1.1 billion project is completed in 2015, cars and traffic noise will no longer dominate many key landscapes of the Presidio national park.

Question received wisdom. Traffic engineers shot down many of SPUR’s and Painter’s novel ideas as dangerous because they weren’t what drivers expected to experience. While it’s undeniable that drivers are creatures of habit, they can still adapt. Near the end of the negotiations, SPUR asked to see the literature on driver expectations. At a subsequent meeting, we asked again. A senior engineer quietly confessed, “There isn’t any.” So much for the scientific basis of policy.

Question traffic models. Computer modeling errs on the side of more, not less. Because the models encourage overbuilding, which attracts more traffic, they are often self-fulfilling. But because they carry the aura of certainty, you need professionals to challenge their results.

Public consultation easily goes off the rails. Fear of change can raise the most bizarre and unexpected concerns. The noisiest and most persistent community members often dominate the debates, escalating reasonable concerns into impossible-to-satisfy demands. Successfully taking a community’s real temperature is a skill, usually not taught, that planners must learn to master.

Alexander, Painter and SPUR spent over a decade working on this project, with their vision ultimately prevailing. Michael is now a resident of Vancouver, and is repeatedly amazed (despite some Vancouverites’ perceptions) at how it’s possible to achieve a civic consensus and to move forward quickly – as the story of the Georgia and Dunsmuit Viaducts illustrates.

City Council will be getting the joint Planning and Engineering report on the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts today. You can see the slide show here – worth looking at as a demonstration of a new sophistication in presentation style. This is one of the best I’ve seen coming out of City Hall (and as a councillor for 15 years, I saw a lot of PowerPoint).

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Coming up, public consultation:

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From everything I’ve seen so far, I’d be surprised if we didn’t proceed with the idea of removing the viaducts – and then working out the details to make sure it can happen with a minimum of fuss, including impacts on traffic.

One idea I haven’t seen so far: keep a fragment of the viaducts over the skateboard park, to both act as rain protection for the skaters and a reminder of motordom for everyone else.

More than six miles long, [the Madrid Rio] transforms a formerly neglected area in the middle of Spain’s capital. Its creation, in four years, atop a complex network of tunnels dug to bury an intrusive highway, also rejuvenates a long-lost stretch of the Manzanares River, and in so doing knits together neighborhoods that the highway had cut off from the city center.

Two points: (1) Why haven’t we all heard about this before?

Spain spent $6 billion to tunnel 27 miles of the the M-30 expressway, and, of that, $500 million to create the surface greenway – the six-mile Madrid Rio. Here’s an aerial map of part of it under construction in the central city:

This puts it in the class of Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon (which, I suppose, is not all that well known over here, either) – and another example of how a massive capital project to remove a surface or elevated freeway dramatically increases property values and human values (someone needs to do a study on that!)

The park, ironically, was something of an afterthought:

Only several years after construction on the tunnels had begun in 2003, with the inevitable traffic snarls provoking a political firestorm, did the city organize a competition. Various big-name architects proposed erecting flashy buildings.

The winner was a group of local architects, led by Ginés Garrido, who teamed up with Adriaan Geuze and his high-profile Dutch urban design and landscape firm, West 8. They proposed no grand new time-consuming, budget-breaking monuments, but a suite of modest new bridges, along with the renovation of some great historic ones, amid a variety of green spaces. …

Public grumbling about traffic jams gradually morphed into praise for a new green space.

Secondly, the passerelle, the Arganzuela Bridge, was also something of an afterthought too:

It’s only a pity that the city also awarded Dominique Perrault, one of the celebrity architects who lost the competition, a late commission. Evidently nervous about leaving the project without a new architectural landmark, the government approved his costly design for an oversize footbridge. Wrapped in an immense, incongruous spiral of Mr. Perrault’s signature stainless-steel mesh, the striking bridge blocks views and conjures up some giant antenna that has crashed in the park.

Be sure to check out the slide show comments, given the observations that the Times correspondent makes about the difficulties of doing anything similar on this continent. (Vancouver will have its chance to show what we can do with the Viaducts.)

Eric Britton at World Streets also has an important comment, given that the expense of this civic project – mainly to bury the road – is perhaps one of the reasons Spain is in such financial difficulties:

… we now have as a result of these great demonstration projects a strong and growing public awareness of the importance of creating this public space and amenity in the city (i.e., a growing base of political support), and at the same time from the leading edge of policy and practice of transport in cities the knowledge that we can still do this in parallel with reducing the infrastructure take of the all-car system.

In other words, could they have got most of the advantages at a fraction of the cost if they hadn’t been so determined to save the road capacity?

UPDATE: A good friend from Madrid, Brian Williamson, responds:

Madrid Rio is one of those major projects that really does transform a city. My first visit was a couple of weeks after it opened and I would estimate that there were at least a half million people there. As the thousands of newly-planted trees mature, it will all look even better and perform better as a park.

One of my favourite little details was a set of swings hanging down from one of the bridges. (I’ve always wanted swings installed under the Burrard Bridge.)

My only real concern is the absence of serious facilities for bicycles. (But that is consistent with all projects in Madrid. It seems that no one who actually uses a bike is allowed to participate in any facility or transportation planning!)

The transit system is wonderful; the planning for future capacity in major stations is quite amazing, as are the pedestrian facilities. I did a little post on my live journal about integration of old and new a while ago: http://pbehr.livejournal.com/22041.html

As for funding, Spain’s financial problems come from massive over-construction in the private sector. There are more than two million unoccupied housing units (out of a total of 25 million). Governments for the most part have been fairly responsible (not all and not always, of course). Bailing out the banks and funding unemployment benefits for construction workers have been the big-ticket items.

The video of Toderian’s speech on November 28 to the Urban Development Institute on issues relating to affordability, city planning, CACs, architecture and housing supply.

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Unfortunately you have to follow along with the slide show reproduced here – but in truth you’ll get a pretty good sense of the major points by checking out the sequence of images.

He does mention in his talk that the City is not, as rumoured, pulling back from laneway housing. Indeed, it’s encouraging more of ’em. Brent sends along this piece from Canadian Architect by Matthew Soules:

It would seem then that the greatest potential of laneway housing is not so much in the realm of densification, but rather to offer a heightened metropolitan experience to largely suburban areas of the city that are resistant to change. The foregrounding of the lane could offer an experiential thickening of the city at large.

From this vantage point, the first crop of laneway housing doesn’t offer as much as it could. How future projects enrich the lane by truly treating it as a front through direct engagement so that the space of the lane fully enters the foreground of the city remains the as-of-yet unrealized potential of Vancouver’s by-law.